Slide 1
Food companies need to stay on top of the latest developments in order to survive and grow their business. Today's consumers have never been so interested in the food they eat. The public's fascination with health and nutrition makes it headline news. Food Science is a diverse subject area and covers many disciplines including all the life sciences, such as biochemistry, microbiology and biotechnology, as well as process engineering and traditional food science and nutrition. Knowing where to start to find food science information can be time-consuming and complicated. Just executing a simple search in Google or other Internet search engine may give you far too much information. Sorting out the good from the bad can seem like a daunting task. Resources are plentiful but not necessarily available in one place. Food Science and Technology Abstracts (FSTA) (File 51) provides a comprehensive source for food science—all in one database. This overview describes the FSTA database—the free file of the month for September.
Slide 2
Produced by IFIS — International Food Information Service, an independent, not-for-profit organization whose primary objective is to provide quality information products and services designed to meet the needs of all those working in the food sector, Food Science and Technology Abstracts® or FSTA is the world's leading database of information on food science, food technology and nutrition. It contains approximately 850,000 records with approximately 40,000 new records added each year. It provides a rapid way for food scientists, researchers and technical staff to locate relevant information from a wealth of international sources. Thousands of food scientists across the world rely on FSTA for its comprehensive coverage and high-quality content and indexing. Its Thesaurus contains more than 10,200 terms to provide precision searching. All these terms are carefully chosen keywords relating to the fields of food science, food technology and food-related human and pet nutrition. Selection is based upon frequency of occurrence in FSTA. The database covers from 1969 to the present and is updated weekly so you get the most current articles available.
Slide 3
The food science industry is diverse and the food manufacturing cycle encompasses all of the relevant areas from distribution and retail through to production, food safety and quality control. FSTA provides information for each phase of the food manufacturing cycle.
Slide 4
FSTA keeps you up-to-date in all areas related to food and beverages including the latest in research, new product development, quality assurance and control, food safety, food composition, regulations and consumer trends. It covers a wide range of topics in food science, food technology, and food related human nutrition. FSTA covers topics relating to every aspect of the food chain including biotechnology, microbiology, additives, packaging and pet foods.
Slide 5
FSTA boasts an unrivalled coverage of journals from many fields of relevance to food science, food technology and nutrition. The database includes material from over 4,600 serial publications published in up to 40 languages. Other publications include: patents and theses, conference proceedings, legislation and standards and more. Patent sources, for example, include European Patent Office (EPO); World Patents (Patent Co-operation Treaty (PCT)) from 104 countries, and country patents from the USA, UK, Germany, France, Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, Spain, Finland, Greece, Italy, Ireland, Luxembourg, Portugal, Canada and Japan. The chart shows the number of each type of source added to the database in 2008.
Slide 6
Each record is allocated to a section that reflects the appropriate subject area. This graph shows the different subject areas with the number of records added in a specific year, in this case 2008.
Slide 7
In 2007 FSTA reported a big increase of approximately 10,000 records over 2006.
The database has experienced sustained growth since then and in 2009 they expect to add approximately 45,000 records.
Slide 8
The FSTA abstracts are informative and contain everything of food relevance from the original article. Each abstract includes aims of the study, its significance to the food industry, materials and methods used and results and conclusions. Highly skilled scientists extract the food-related information from a vast range of original literature to form concise, comprehensive summaries.
Slide 9
Reliable, accurate, and timely information is of major importance at all stages of the food manufacturing cycle. Here are some reasons why food research centers, nutritionists, food retailers and exporters, companies manufacturing food, food ingredients, and food-related equipment, government departments dealing with food and agriculture issues and other sectors with food interests, including healthcare, pharmaceutical, agrochemical, legal and marketing, to name a few, use FSTA to:
FSTA abstracts are value-added. The IFIS editorial team add extra information to the abstracts including microbial names, enzyme numbers, author's email addresses, and much more.
Slide 10
Sample titles show the diverse nature of Food Science and Technology Abstracts.
Slide 11
The following example illustrates the type of information you can find in a FSTA record. This is a sample record when conducting a search on food safety. Each record includes full bibliographic data (title, author, journal and date of publication), Next, FSTA abstracts are highly informative and wherever possible, include additional information of food-relevance from the original article. To help you search, FSTA is fully indexed with 10,246 keyword terms taken from the FSTA Thesaurus.
Slide 12
In this second example, from a search on organic fertilizers we see an article relating to microbiology. Note that this record has a Dialog eLink to the fulltext. Indexing includes descriptor headings, descriptors and section headings.
Slide 13
As you can see, Food Science and Technology Abstracts (FSTA) (File 51) provides comprehensive information about food science topics worldwide from reliable sources.
Slide 14
This completes our overview of Food Science and Technology Abstracts. Thank you for your interest in this premier business database and put it on your list to try for free in September.
